The MPEG-4 Fine-Granular Scalability (FGS) framework allows for different levels of compression for different parts of a video image by using an adaptive quantization technique, referred to as Selective Enhancement. Selective Enhancement of FGS encoded video images is more fully disclosed in U.S. Patent Application Ser. No. 60/217,827, entitled, “System And Method For Fine Granular Scalable Video With Selective Quality Enhancement,” filed on Jul. 12, 2000. An improvement to the transmission efficiency of selectively enhanced FGS video signals is more fully disclosed in U.S. patent application, Ser. No. 09/887,747, entitled “Method And Apparatus For Improved Efficiency In Transmission Of Fine Granular Scalable Selective Enhanced Images, filed on Jun. 22, 2001.
Utilizing selective enhancement designated areas of an FGS encoded video image may be transmitted to achieve a higher quality level than non-designated areas of the image. As disclosed in the referred to patents applications, a higher quality level or higher resolution of a transmitted image may be achieved by “shifting” specific or designated areas or regions of FGS encoded image elements to a higher transmission priority level. The selectively enhanced images are thus transmitted out of their normal sequence. The specific or designated areas or regions may be associated with a specific pixel, pixel arrays or sets or pixel arrays, referred to herein as macroblocks. An indication of enhancement factor or shift factor is also associated with each shifted FGS encoded image elements, i.e., macroblocks.
One disadvantage of the current selective enhancement method is that the shifting factors and the area or areas selected for selected enhancement are essentially pre-determined and allocated during the FGS encoding processing. Such selection of enhanced areas may be preformed by an automatic system based on some predetermined rules. For example, data blocks associated with the slowest movement within the image may be selected for enhancement. Alternatively, faces within the image may be more enhanced than the background. However, these rule-based automatic systems often fail to enhance precisely what the user or viewer is interested in. Hence, that is the area or region of interest selected by the automatic system may not coincide with the area or region that is of interest to the user or viewer.
Hence, there is a need to provide a system that allows the user or viewer to select or allocate an area or areas or interest for transmission as enhanced FGS encoded data.